Travelling labourers played a big part in rural life

There was a harvest scheme introduced by the government in July 1944 and it was under the aegis of the Department of Industry and Commerce. In 1947, the scheme was transferred to the Department of Social Welfare. 

The idea was to transfer labourers from the counties on the western seaboard where farms were small and there was not as much tillage, meaning the harvest would not be as extensive.

The opposite was the case on the east coast where the farm size was much larger and there would be a need for much more farm labourers to complete the harvest of oats, wheat and rye and the potatoes as well. It is worth remembering this scheme was introduced at the height of World War II when the Fianna Fáil government, under Taoiseach Eamon de Valera, was striving for national self-sufficient in both food and fuel supplies. It needed all hands on deck to harvest the crops on the east coast that were being produced under the compulsory tillage schemes. 

This meant that the government was willing to subsidise this harvest scheme and pay the labourers who applied for the cost of travel and transport and for their board and lodging too. The sum total for the travel and lodging was 10/- (ten shillings) and the farmer who applied for the scheme and was approved by the tillage inspector or supervisor then had to pay the wages of the labourer to the sum of at least one shilling and twopence per hour. This scheme was advertised in the local papers from 1944 to 1947.

This was at a time when there were poor conditions in places like north and east Mayo where labourers would travel to Scotland and England to work on the farms there during the harvest season. There were people on outdoor relief also and they were in debt to the local shopkeepers until their menfolk would arrive home with the earnings from the English and Scottish farms. The men who were left behind would assist with the harvesting of the oats, wheat and rye as well as the turf and the potatoes and the kelp in the case of seashore communities. The children would be sent out to the roadsides to pick the blackberries for jams and pies. Such were the conditions during the 1930s and 1940s in the years before, during and after World War II.

The threshing of the oats was a major event in the lives of the rural people when the meitheal was brought into operation and the people helped each other to harvest and thresh the oats by piling them into stooks and then making a rick in the garden in the same way that they made a rick of hay when there were no hay sheds. 

It was hard work. There were eight men needed to work on the thresher to feed the oats into the machine and then to bag it after separating the grain from the straw and the chaff. It took a full day and then there would be a meal for the men who took part in the threshing. They then moved on to the next holding until the threshing season was over. After that, it was time to pick and pit the potatoes and then all was ready for the winter season.

The harvest was and continues to be an important part of the farm year. Once this was complete, the farm work for the year was done. The harvest scheme was an important source of income for farmers in the West as was the money they earned from England and Scotland. They had very little machinery at the time and they might have a horse-drawn mowing machine for the grass to make the hay and for the oat crop. If they did not have a mowing machine then they had to resort to the bill hook, reaping hook or the scythe and this was very hard work.

To compound matters, there was a very wet summer in 1946 and the crop was partially if not completely lost. There were special appeals for men and women to save the harvest and this was known as the harvest emergency.

Many farmers from the Mayo, Sligo and other western counties went east in the 1940s to work for the larger farmers. The practice long pre-dated the harvest scheme. In fact, it had been going on for centuries when 'spalpeens' or travelling labourers moved around the country in search of work. 

There was not as much need for the labourers when mechanisation came along and the machine could do the work of many men. The former farm workers either retired or diversified into the construction industry or became agricultural contractors with the advent of the tractor.